The results of the first campaign in favour of Sulla were the
submission of Apulia, Picenum, and Campania, the dissolution of
the one, and the vanquishing and blockading of the other, consular
army. The Italian communities, compelled severally to choose
between their twofold oppressors, already in numerous instances
entered into negotiations with him, and caused the political
rights, which had been won from the opposition party, to be
guaranteed to them by formal separate treaties on the part
of the general of the oligarchy. Sulla cherished the distinct
expectation, and intentionally made boast of it, that he would
overthrow the revolutionary government in the next campaign and
again march into Rome.

But despair seemed to furnish the revolution with fresh energies.
The consulship was committed to two of its most decided leaders,
to Carbo for the third time and to Gaius Marius the younger; the
circumstance that the latter, who was just twenty years of age,
could not legally be invested with the consulship, was as little
heeded as any other point of the constitution. Quintus Sertorius,
who in this and other matters proved an inconvenient critic, was
ordered to proceed to Etruria with a view to procure new levies,
and thence to his province Hither Spain.